


Same Time Next Week

by yeats



Category: Kings (TV 2009)
Genre: Implied Slash, M/M, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-09
Updated: 2015-11-09
Packaged: 2018-04-30 17:38:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5173175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeats/pseuds/yeats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Most people, Jack can size up in thirty seconds if they're going to sleep with him.  Thirty-five, before he's had his coffee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Same Time Next Week

Jack likes this couch.

At first, he hated it, spent a whole month at the beginning of his sessions trying to carve his initials with his penknife, just because he could. In the summer, the cushions swell like squid bodies, heat-slick; the leather squelches against his arm skin when he stands. 

He tells all this to Naomi, but she doesn't write any of it down.

"Thank you, Jack. I'm glad you like it."

Today, he's reclined; the buttons of the quilted upholstery press against his vertebrae. He props up his feet -- black leather on black leather.

"Where do you even find a couch like this?" he says, head pillowed on his arms. "Is there a store you go to? A Freudian-wannabe catalogue that comes with your degree?"

Naomi's eyebrow ticks; her pencil stays flat against her yellow legal pad. At first, she used to take down everything he said, like one of his father's dictation monkeys, filling up four pages in one sitting. By now, though, she's gotten used to his bullshit. He likes that, too.

"What do you mean, your bullshit?"

The ceiling in here's pretty boring; Jack's noticed that before -- twelve by twelve square insulation panels, minus two at the doorway. He's counted. "Eighty-five percent of what I say on any given day." He grins. "Runs in the family, I guess."

"Hm." Naomi adjusts her glasses over her nose, glances at the clock fixed on the wall above Jack's head. By now, Jack knows better than to look up; the way it's hung, only the person in the chair can read it. He works out a crick in his neck, tilts his head and soaks in the feeling of having slipped free from time entirely.

She's all done up today, charcoal pencil skirt and a ruched silk blouse, kitten heels with a winklepicker toe like she's going somewhere special later. A light dusting of rouge over her cheeks, her eyelashes thick with mascara. She looks good. Jack thinks she should do it more often.

No use in starting that, though. In the eight months Jack's been coming here -- since before deployment to the Regiment, since before the ambush and David Shepherd and the gash that still smarts, pulsing in time with Jack's heartbeat when he's tired or when he thinks too hard about David -- he's never tried anything, and she's never given him any indication she'd be up for it. Most people, Jack can size up in thirty seconds if they're going to sleep with him. Thirty-five, before he's had his coffee. It's just something he does. A talent, like burping the royal anthem or unzipping a pair of jeans with his teeth.

Naomi, though, remains closed off, legs crossed in her chair across the room. Jack spins out his own version of a man that a woman like her would want to date: an academic, likely, some kind of perpetual student man-child, who served his time on the Front sketching images of local flora and migratory bird patterns. Jack reaches out with an invisible hand and pinches her calf, tweaking the crooked seam of her nylon stocking just so.

Naomi looks up, sharp. Jack starts counting ceiling tiles.

"You know," he says, "you'd think the Royal head-shrink would have a nicer office." 

A car door slams; an alarm goes off, three stories below. Jack drove here himself, but there are three men billeted on the street. He's not sure if he's supposed to notice them, but Palace Guards are all of a type. Their faces always greasy from pressing their noses to the windows.

They probably think he's in the middle of his weekly romp with some excruciatingly talented whore.

If only.

"How have you been sleeping?"

"All right."

"No dreams?"

"What do you mean?"

"The last time you were here, you said you were having nightmares every night."

"I did?"

"You said they were giving you trouble sleeping."

"I don't think that's what I said."

Jack closes his eyes, waits for the insistent skritch of pencil on paper. Nothing.

"Are you sure I said I wasn't sleeping?" He pitches his voice as though asking about lunch, the weather. "Maybe I said I wasn't eating."

"Have you been eating?"

"Did I say I wasn't?" Jack cracks one eyelid open -- Naomi catches him. Her hands cross in her lap, prim; he snaps his eyes shut again.

"They're going to hold an inquiry." He milks each syllable. "They're saying I was reckless with the lives of the men in my command. Did my father tell you?"

"I don't work for your father, Jack."

"Everyone works for my father." Jack holds the ceiling accountable, glares at the shadows in the corner by the wall. "You just haven't been drafted yet."

"You sound angry with him."

"I do?"

"A little." Naomi taps the blunt eraser of her pencil against the top of her notepad.

"Angry with my father," Jack echoes, sucking in a breath. "Is that your official diagnosis?" He tugs at the sleeve of his shirt, sliding the cuff taut over his thumb. "Eh, doc? There a little blue pill you can prescribe that'll fix me right up?"

"It doesn't work like that." An underswell of pity girds Naomi's voice. 

Jack hates pity, more than anything else in the fucking world. "I know how it fucking works." 

He sits up, crosses his arms, shoulders hunched down. Glares at her, with her smarmy little off-the-rack cardigan, her schoolmistress glasses, and her pencil, gliding its way across the page like it knows everything about Jack, like it's got him all figured out.

"What happened in Gath?"

"Nothing happened in Gath," Jack seethes.

"You almost died."

"Lots of people did die."

"Are you having nightmares about the Front?"

"Fuck the Front." Jack snaps his cufflinks. "Fuck Gath."

"Fuck David Shepherd?"

Jack's up like a shot, off the couch and halfway across the room. Naomi's pencil keeps writing, scratching and scratching, and Jack rakes his forearms with his nails, as though the words are being etched on the underside of his skin, as though he can scrape off the flush that rises at David's name.

"That's slander," he says. He presses his back to the wall, but still he can't help the feeling that something's about to sneak up on him. "That's — impugning the character of the royal family's a treasonous offense."

"Only if I'm lying." The pencil stills.

"You fucking bitch." Jack gnaws at his shirt cuff, a habit his father slapped out of him a decade ago. The starch stings his tongue. "You don't know what you're talking about."

"Maybe I don't."

"You don't!" Jack's voice cracks. He slams his balled fists into his eye sockets, and rocket flares explode out at him from the insides of his eyelids. Red, like the ones overhead when they crossed the border. AV-21 bombers: that characteristic triad pattern of their engine lights, state-of-the-art, just off the assembly line, and Jack had been there with Silas when the first one took flight, saluting in his new uniform; he'd been there. He'd seen them. He knew it.

The timer dings.

Naomi's chair shrieks against the floorboards. When Jack looks, she's smoothing out her skirt. She pulls a pack of cigarettes from the top drawer of her desk, shakes one loose and lights it.

"Same time next week"

She lights another. Jack takes it.

"Yeah," he says, and sucks deep. "Yeah."

**Author's Note:**

> This story is six years old, but I recently came across it again and decided it wasn't half bad.


End file.
